The Chronoliths

Handguns had come back into vogue during the troubles. I did not like owning one — among other things, it made me feel like a hypocrite — but I had become convinced that it was prudent. So I had taken the required courses, filled out all the forms, registered both the weapon and my genome with ATF, and purchased a small-caliber handgun that recognized my fingerprints (and no one else’s) when I picked it up. I had owned this device for some three years now and I had never fired it outside of the training range.

I put it in my pocket and walked down four flights of stairs to the lobby of the building and then across the street toward the parked car.

The bearded man in the driver’s seat showed no sign of alarm. He smiled at me — smirked, in fact — as I approached. When I was close enough to make myself heard I said, “You need to explain to me what you’re doing here.”

His grin widened. “You really don’t recognize me, do you? You don’t have the faintest idea.”

Which was not what I had expected. The voice did sound familiar, but I couldn’t place it.

He stuck his hand out of the car window. “It’s me, Scott — Ray Mosely. I used to be about fifty pounds heavier. The beard is new.”

Ray Mosely. Sue Chopra’s understudy and hopeless courtier.

I hadn’t seen him since before Kait’s adventure in Portillo — since I retired from all that business to make a new life with Ashlee.

“Well, damn,” was all I managed.

“You look about the same,” he said. “That made it easier to find you.”

Without the body fat he looked almost gaunt, even with the beard. Almost a ghost of himself. “You didn’t have to stalk me, Ray. You could have come up to the table and said hello.”

“Well, people change. For all I know you could be a firebreathing Copperhead by now.”

“Fuck you, too.”

“Because it’s important. We kind of need your help.”

“Who’s ‘we’?”

“Sue, for one. She could use a place to stay for a little while.”

I was still trying to cope with that information when the rear window rolled down and Sue herself poked her big ungainly peanut-shaped head out of the darkness.

She gri

Nineteen

In the past seven years I had told Ashlee a great deal about Sue Chopra and her friends. That didn’t mean Ash was pleased to come home and find two of these worthies occupying her living-room sofa.

It had seemed obvious to me, after Portillo, that I would have to choose between my life with Ashlee and my work for Sue. Sue persisted in her belief that the advance of the Chronoliths could be turned back, given the right technology or even the appropriate degree of understanding. Privately, I doubted it. Consider the word itself, “Chronolith” — an ugly portmanteau word coined by some tone-deaf journalist shortly after Chumphon, a word I had never liked but which I had come to appreciate for its aptness. Chronos, time, and lithos, stone, and wasn’t that the heart of the matter? Time made solid as rock. A zone of absolute determinacy, surrounded by a froth of ephemera (human lives, for instance) which deformed to fit its contours.

I did not wish to be deformed. The life I wanted with Ashlee was the life the Chronoliths had stolen from me. We had come back from Tucson, Ash and I, to lick our wounds and to take from each other what strength we were able to give. I could not have given Ashlee much if I had gone on working for Sulamith Chopra, if I had continued to dip into the tau turbulence, if I persisted in making myself an instrument of fate.

Not that we had lost contact entirely. Sue still called on me occasionally for consultation, though there was little I could do professionally without access to her mil-spec code incubators. More often, she called to keep me up to date, share her optimistic or pessimistic moods, gossip. She took, I think, a vicarious pleasure in the life I had made for myself — as if it were somehow exotic; as if there weren’t a million families like mine, making do in hard times. Certainly I had not expected her to arrive at my doorstep in this cloak-and-dagger fashion.

Ash had exchanged a few words with Sue on the phone but they had never been formally introduced, and Ray was a stranger to her. I made the introductions with a gusto that was perhaps too obviously insincere. Ashlee nodded and shook hands and retreated to the kitchen “to make coffee,” i.e., to work out her concerns about their presence here.

It was only a visit, Ray insisted. Sue still maintained her network of co

“You could have called ahead.”

“I suppose so, Scotty, but you never know who’s listening. Between the closet Copperheads in Congress and the crazies on the street…” She shrugged. “If it’s inconvenient, we’ll take a hotel room.”

“You’ll stay here,” I said. “I’m just curious.”

Plainly there was more to this than a friendly reunion. But neither she nor Ray would volunteer details, and I guessed that was all right with me, at least for tonight. Sue and all her furor and obsession seemed a long time gone. Many things had changed since Portillo.

Oh, I still watched the news of Kuin’s advances, when the bandwidth allowed, and I still occasionally wondered what “tau turbulence” might mean and how it might have affected me. But these were night fears, the kind of thing you think about when you can’t sleep and rain taps on the window like an unwelcome visitor. I had given up attempting to understand any of this in Sue’s terms — her conversations with Ray always veered too quickly into C-Y geometry and dark quarks and such esoteric matters. And as for the Chronoliths themselves… should I be ashamed to admit that I had achieved a private, separate peace with them? That I was resigned to my own inability to influence these vast and mysterious events? Maybe it was a small treason. But it felt like sanity.

It was disturbing, then, to be back in the presence of Sue, whose obsessions still burned very brightly. She was polite when we talked about old times or familiar faces. But her eyes brightened and her voice gained a decibel as soon as talk turned to the recent advent of the Freetown Chronolith or the advance of the Kuinist armies into Nigeria.

I watched her while she talked. That gloriously uncontrollable crown of coiled hair had grayed at the fringes. When she smiled, the skin at the corners of her eyes wrinkled complexly. She was ski

And Ray Mosely, incredibly, was still in love with her. He did not, of course, say this. I suspect Ray experienced his love for Sulamith Chopra as a private humiliation, forever invisible to outsiders. But it wasn’t invisible. And maybe he had made his own bargain with it: better to nurse a futile affection than to concede to lovelessness. Bearded as he was, thin now almost to the point of anorexia, his hair receding like a childhood memory, Ray still gave Sue those deferential glances, still smiled when she smiled, laughed when she laughed, rose to her defense at the first hint of criticism.

And when Sue nodded at Ashlee in the kitchen and said, “I envy you, Scotty. I always wanted to settle down with a good woman,” Ray chuckled obediently. And winced, all at once.

Before I went to bed I turned out the sofa-bed and shook out a set of spare blankets. This could only have been torture for Ray, sleeping next to Sue in absolute and unquestioned chastity, listening to the sound of her breath. But it was the only accommodation I had to offer, apart from the floor.